Ambiguity: Requirements vs. Solution

During the course of every Business Intelligence initiative, project teams will encounter the pervasive challenge of ambiguity.

There are various project management approaches to tackle ambiguity, like the agile movement of iterative discovery.

Since B.I. often needs to address business processes, in terms of replicating implied business logic and derive related metrics, it is interesting to look look at a common pattern in the B.I. tool/service acquisition process:

Now, consider that this pattern does not just apply to company/3rd party vendor relations, but also to internal  customer/provider relationships, such as a corporate marketing department requesting self-serve functionality from the internal B.I. team.

You see how at each connection point, another layer for potential confusion gets introduced, like in the old childrens' game of "telephone operator".

Of course pragmatic requirements management could alleviate some of those layers of ambiguity.